The Good, the Bad, and the Indie: Week 06, 2022.
GOOD NEWS
This week, the Department of Justice tracked down the dastardly duo behind a 2016 heist of 119,754 $BTC: startup founder Ilya Lichtenstein and wife Heather Morgan, a Forbes-published writer and moonlighting cringe rapper (you read that right). The DOJ recovered on $3.6B-worth of the BTC; the total stolen amount equal $5,311,964,104.20. (Damn, son!) Other goodies found near the pile of crypto include a spreadsheet of accounts linked to the stolen funds and a list of dark-web sites that sold passports and IDs.
GOOD NEWS RUNNERS-UP
You can now mint your own ERC-20 tokens on Mirror.
Did Alfa Romeo just extend the usefulness of NFTs as not only a car title but also a dynamic diagnostic tool?
BAD NEWS
This week, rapper Gunna pulled a quick and quiet rug to fleece his fans and turn a cheap buck, but he was quickly busted by “on-chain sleuth” zachxbt. The scam looked like this: Gunna tweeted that he was launching a token called PushinPETH. He encouraged his fans to bring it to the moon. The rugging was done within 8 hours, and everyone’s money was gone. Even the tweet was deleted. Every web3 citizen would be wise to bookmark zachxbt’s Investigation Dashboard.
BAD NEWS RUNNERS-UP
ENS Director of Ops Brantly Millegan was let go from his position after twitter users accused him of homophobic, transphobic, and anti-woman tweets surfaced from 2016. Millegan, a devout Catholic, stands by his views.
This isn’t bad news yet, but all eyes are on Russia as they prepare to release crypto regulations soon. It’s expected that legislation from Russia — currently home to 11% of the world’s crypto mining ops — will set the tone for how other countries approach regulation, including the United States.
The BBC pulled a documentary about a “self-made crypto millionaire” Hanad Hassan this week. This particular writer thinks that maybe someone had the good sense to investigate the “long, slow rug pull” that Hassan orchestrated with the token Orfano back in October.
INDIE NEWS
We're in Denver this week for Schelling Point & ETHDenver, here are some of the events we have on our schedule, come say hi and meet the team behind IndieDAO!
OUR EVENTS
Thursday, Feb 17th: Schelling Point, Soulbound Reputation Talk - 12:45p. We’ll be speaking about the launch of lvl protocol and designing for composability. This has been a lot of work in the making.
Thursday, Feb 17th: ETHDenver, Indie Cafe, IndieDAO Happy Hour - 3-5pm. Come hang out, talk tech or your life passions. Drinks included.
Saturday, Feb 19th: ETHDenver, Into the Pussyverse Panel - We will be speaking with our fellow founders
EVENTS WE’LL BE HITTING UP
Wednesday, Feb 16th: ETHDenver, Gnosis Chain Validator Session Workshop - 1:45p We’re excited about what Gnosis Chain is up to
Thursday, Feb 17th: ETHDenver, Are your NFTs safe? - 12p. Matt Ober, co-founder of Pinata will be sharing insights using IPFS & CIDs